Delphi Complete Poetry and Plays of W. B. Yeats (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by W. B. Yeats

  Ye do it wrong, being so majestical,

  To offer it the show of violence.

  When I try to recall his physical appearance, my father’s picture in the Municipal Gallery blots out my own memory. He comes before me with a normal robust body, dim obsessed eyes, upon the wall above his head the title of a forgotten novel: Ye Loste Lande.

  XII

  The Countess Cathleen and The Heather Field were performed in the week commencing May 8th, 1899, and such was our faith in the author of The Heather Field that, though we had not seen his unfinished play, we engaged the Gaiety Theatre for a week in 1900. His play, understood to be satirical and topical, was to be the main event. Maeve, originally published with The Heather Field, would accompany it, but was, we thought, too poetical, too remote from normal life to draw the crowd. I spent the summer at Coole; George Moore was at Tulira, but on Sunday mornings Edward Martyn’s old coachman would drive up by the Gort Avenue, George Moore behind him on the old outside car: Moore had been to Mass. As Moore had been brought up a Catholic, Martyn insisted upon Mass; how they avoided the Ardrahan church and Martyn’s company I cannot remember; perhaps Martyn went to early Mass; but Gort suited them both. Moore would listen for a minute, would slip out, meet his coachman at the side door of a public-house which ignored the Act of Parliament for its more valuable customers, find the outside car in some yard. Coole was but two miles off, one mile of road, one mile of demesne under great trees. Devotion to Parnell had made the coachman an anti-cleric. A couple of years later I saw him for the last time, he wanted an introduction to somebody he knew of that lacked a coachman. When Lady Gregory asked about his dismissal he said: ‘I think Mr. Martyn thought I must soon die because I am an old man, and that he might see my ghost’. Lady Gregory remembered that Mrs. Martyn had died the year before, that Martyn, whose conscience tortured him because he had opposed her plans, perhaps because he had refused to marry, had seen some sight or heard some sound that terrified him. Sometimes Moore drove over in the afternoon. One afternoon he asked to see me alone. I brought him to the path by the lakeside. He had constructed The Heather Field, he said, telling Martyn what was to go into every speech but writing nothing, had partly constructed Maeve---I heard only the other day that Arthur Symons had revised the style for a fee, setting it high above Martyn’s level---but that Martyn now refused his help. ‘He can find subjects’, Moore said, ‘and I cannot, but he will never write a play alone; I am ready to collaborate all my life and say nothing about it. You must go to Tulira and persuade Martyn.’ This was a Moore I had known nothing of; he had certainly kept silent; it was improbable he could do so now that the play was a success, but it did not seem so at the moment. Moore in his moments of self-abnegation was convinced and convincing. I do not remember whether he had brought the new play as Martyn had written it or whether Martyn sent it later, but I know that my interview with Martyn was postponed until Lady Gregory and I had read it. It seemed to us crude throughout, childish in parts, a play to make our movement and ourselves ridiculous. I was now Moore’s advocate and, unlike Lady Gregory, unable to see with Martyn’s eyes. I went to Tulira and there denounced the play. I seem to remember Moore as anxious and subdued. Later when he described the scene he compared me to Torquemada. Martyn told us to do what we liked with the play. Moore asked for my collaboration as it was a satire upon contemporary Irish politics and of these he knew nothing. I moved from Coole to Tulira. The finished work was Moore’s in its construction and characterization, but most of the political epigrams and certain bitter sentences put into the mouth of Deane, a dramatization of Standish O’Grady, were mine. A rhetorical, undramatic second act about the Celtic Movement, which I had begun to outlive, was all Moore’s; as convert he was embarrassing, unsubduable, preposterous.

  Lady Gregory thought that no man could endure the sight of others altering all that he had done and discussing the alterations within earshot. She was doubtless right, for Martyn suddenly took the play back. If he could not write his own plays he was no use, he said; but when the position of the theatre was put before him, my determination and Lady Gregory’s to refuse his play, his loss of money, for he was to pay for all, if we had only Maeve, he gave way once more. Moore, however, must sign the play; he would not sign with him ‘because Moore would put in what he liked.’ Moore was unwilling, he thought little could be made of such material; but being for the moment all self-abnegation, agreed, and was soon convinced that he had written a masterpiece.

  There were continual quarrels, sometimes because both were woman-mad, Martyn with contempt, sometimes because Moore did not want to go to Mass, once because he had over-slept himself ‘on purpose.’ Yet Moore was at this time neither anti-clerical nor anti-Catholic. He had written not only Evelyn Innes but Sister Teresa, a sympathetic study of a convent; nor was he ever to lose an understanding of emotions and beliefs remembered from childhood. He did not want to go to Mass, because his flesh was unwilling, as it was a year later when the teacher, engaged to teach him Gaelic, was told that he was out.

  He had exhausted his England in A Mummefs Wife and Esther Waters, and had turned to us, seeking his new task with an ungovernable childlike passion. In later years he attributed his distaste for England to his work upon The Bending of the Bough, his name for Martyn’s rewritten play, and it is possible that it made him aware of change. Violent and coarse of temper, he was bound to follow his pendulum’s utmost swing; hatred of Queen Victoria, admiration of Catholicism, hatred of the English language, love of everything Gaelic, were bound to follow one upon another till he had found his new limit. His relations to men and women ran through like alternations, in his relations to women he touched madness. On a visit to Coole, during some revising of The Bending of the Bough, or to begin Diarmuid and Grania, its successor, he behaved well till there came a long pause in the conversation one night after dinner. ‘I wonder’, said Moore, ‘why Mrs. --- threw me over; was it because she wanted to marry ---’ --he named a famous woman and a famous peer---’or was it conscience?’ I followed Moore to his room and said, ‘You have broken the understanding?”What understanding?”That your conversation would be fit for Robert.’ Robert, Lady Gregory’s son, was on holiday there from Harrow. ‘The word conscience can have only one meaning.”But it’s true.”There is a social rule that bars such indiscretions.”It has gone out.”Not here.”But it is the only thing I can say about her that she would mind.’ Mrs. --- had been much taken with Moore, I had heard her talk of him all evening, but was of strict morals: I knew from the friend who had listened to Moore’s daily complaints and later to his contradictory inventions, that he had courted her in vain. Two or three years after his Coole transgression, he was accustomed to say: ‘Once she and I were walking in the Green Park. “There is nothing more cruel than lust”, she said. “There is”, I said. “What is that?”

  “Vanity”, and I let her go a step or two ahead and gave her a kick behind.’

  XIII

  On February 19th, The Bending of the Bough and a narrative undramatic play by Alice Milligan, The Last Feast of the Fianna; on February 20th, Maeve, were performed at the Gaiety Theatre. The actors had been collected by Moore in London. Our audiences, which seemed to us very large, did not fill the house, but were enthusiastic; we worked, perhaps I still work, for a small fanatical sect. The Bending of the Bough was badly constructed, had never become a single thought or passion, but was the first dramatization of an Irish problem. Lady Gregory wrote in her diary: ‘M. is in great enthusiasm over it, says it will cause a revolution’ (whoever M. was he was not Martyn, who hated the play). ‘H. says no young man who sees that play will leave the house as he came into it.... The Gaelic League, in great force, sang “Fainne geal an lae” between the acts, and “The Wearing of the Green” in Irish.... The play hits so impartially all round that no one is really offended.’ Edward Martyn had shaped Peg Inerny, a principal character in Maeve, under the influence of stories gathered by Lady Gregory and myself. She is one of those w
omen who in sleep pass into another state, are ‘away’ as the people say, seem to live among people long dead, in the midst of another civilization. We had thought the play dim and metaphysical, but it did not seem so in performance. Maeve, Lady Gregory wrote, ‘which we did not think a nationalist play at all, has turned out to be one, the audience understanding and applauding the allegory. There is such applause at “I am only an old woman, but I tell you that Erin will never be subdued”, Lady --- reported to the Castle that they had better boycott it, which they have done.’

  XIV

  I disliked Moore’s now sentimental, now promiscuous amours, the main matter of his talk. A romantic, when romanticism was in its final extravagance, I thought one woman, whether wife, mistress, or incitement to platonic love, enough for a lifetime: a Parsifal, Tristram, Don Quixote, without the intellectual prepossessions that gave them solidity. I disliked almost as much the manner of his talk, I told him that he was more mob than man, always an enthusiastic listener or noisy interrupter. Yet I admired him and found myself his advocate. I wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘He is constantly so likeable that one can believe no evil of him, and then in a moment a kind of devil takes hold of him, his voice changes, his look changes, and he becomes hateful.... It is so hard not to trust him, yet he is quite untrustworthy. He has what Talleyrand calls “the terrible gift familiarity”. One must look upon him as a mind that can be of service to one’s cause.’ Moore, driven to frenzy by the Boer War, had some project of lecturing in America against an Anglo-American alliance, much talked of at the time. ‘I shall be glad’, I wrote, ‘if he himself goes.’ (I had refused to go with him.) ‘Less because of any harm he may do the Anglo-American alliance than because it will help to make our extremists think about the foundations of life and letters, which they certainly do not at present. To transmute the anti-English passion into a passion of hatred against the vulgarity and materialism whereon England has founded her worst life and the whole life that she sends us, has always been a dream of mine, and Moore may help in that transmutation.’ Moore, accustomed by his journalism to an immediate sensational contact with public opinion, was always urging Lady Gregory and me to do this or do that, that we might be more notorious, more popular. ‘How Moore lives in the present’, I wrote. ‘If the National Theatre is ever started’ (the company of players that was to succeed to the annual dramatic event with English players) ‘what he is and what I am will be weighed, and very little what we have said or done. A phrase more or less matters little.... Yet I suppose we would both be more popular if I could keep from saying what I think, and Moore from saying what he does not think. You may tell him that the wisest of men does not know what is expedient, but that we can all know what is our particular truth, cajolery never lit the fire.’ Yet to friends who complained by letter or word of mouth against my bringing such a man into the movement, I defended him and attacked his enemies. George Russell (A. E.), afterwards Moore’s chief Dublin friend, had complained much, and I wrote---too much aware of what I thought my own quality---’He and I are the opposite of one another. I think I understand people easily, easily sympathise with all kinds of character, easily forgive all kinds of defects. Apart from opinions which I judge too sternly, I scarcely judge people at all, am altogether lax in my attitude towards conduct. He understands nobody but himself, so must be always condemning or worshipping. He is a good judge of right and wrong so long as they can be judged apart from people, so long as they are merely action to be weighed by the moral sense. His moral enthusiasm is an inspiration, but it makes him understand ideas and not human nature. One pays a price for everything.’ My advocacy had threatened to disrupt the Irish Literary Society which I had founded and still thought a useful instrument. Early in the year its treasurer, Charles Russell, the famous lawyer, invited Moore to become a member, forgot he had done so, proposed that the Committee should blackball him---there was some anti-Catholic passage in A Drama in Muslin--- and was supported by Barry O’Brien, who could not abide Parnell and his Island. I got rid of Charles Russell by producing his letter of invitation, but Barry O’Brien remained, and after a long fight I withdrew Moore’s name and resigned rather than force his resignation. He and I had given the Society what energy it had, keeping it out of the commonplace that was bound to overtake it in the end.

  It was Moore’s own fault that everybody hated him except a few London painters. In one of Dostoievsky’s novels there is a man who proposes that everybody present should tell his worst action. Nobody takes the proposal seriously; everybody is witty or amusing until his turn comes. He confesses that he once stole half- a-crown and left a servant-girl to bear the blame. Moore might have so confessed, but his confession would have been a plagiarism or a whole lie. I met a man who hated Moore because Moore told some audience that he had selected a Parisian street- boy, for one day dressed him in good clothes, housed him in an expensive hotel, gave him all that he wanted, then put him back into rags and turned him out to discover what would happen: a plagiarism from a well-known French author. ‘Yeats,’ he said to me once, ‘I was sitting here in my room the other night when there was a ring. My servant was out; when I opened the door a woman ran in and threw her arms round my neck. “At last I have found you. There were thirteen George Moores in the London Directory. You’re the ninth I have called on. What? Not recollect me---not recollect the woman you raped in Paris twenty years ago?”‘She had called about her daughter’s musical education, he said. Had I been more sympathetic I would have heard of a new Evelyn Innes. He was jealous of his own Sir Owen Asher. He was all self and yet had so little self that he would destroy his reputation, or that of some friend, to make his audience believe that the story running in his head at the moment had happened, had only just happened.

  I saw Moore daily, we were at work on Diarmuid and Grania. Lady Gregory thought such collaboration would injure my own art, and was perhaps right. Because his mind was argumentative, abstract, diagrammatic, mine sensuous, concrete, rhythmical, we argued about words. In later years, through much knowledge of the stage, through the exfoliation of my own style, I learnt that occasional prosaic words gave the impression of an active man speaking. In dream poetry, in Kubla Khan, in The Stream’s Secret, every line, every word, can carry its unanalysable, rich associations; but if we dramatize some possible singer or speaker we remember that he is moved by one thing at a time, certain words must be dull and numb. Here and there in correcting my early poems I have introduced such numbness and dullness, turned, for instance, ‘the curdpale moon’ into the ‘brilliant moon’, that all might seem, as it were, remembered with indifference, except some one vivid image. When I began to rehearse a play I had the defects of my early poetry; I insisted upon obvious all- pervading rhythm. Later on I found myself saying that only in those lines or words where the beauty of the passage came to its climax, must rhythm be obvious. Because Moore thought all drama should be about possible people set in their appropriate surroundings, because he was fundamentally a realist (‘Who are his people?’ he said after a performance of George Russell’s Deirdre. ‘Ours were cattle merchants’) he required many dull, numb words. But he put them in more often than not because he had no feeling for words in themselves, none for their historical associations. He insisted for days upon calling the Fianna ‘soldiers’. In A Storyteller’s Holiday he makes a young man in the thirteenth century go to the ‘salons’ of ‘the fashionable ladies’ in Paris, in his last story men and women of the Homeric age read books. Our worst quarrels, however, were when he tried to be poetical, to write in what he considered my style. He made the dying Diarmuid say to Finn: ‘I will kick you down the stairway of the stars’. My letters to Lady Gregory show that we made peace at last, Moore accepting my judgment upon words, I his upon construction. To that he would sacrifice what he had thought the day before not only his best scene but ‘the best scene in any modern play’, and without regret: all must receive its being from the central idea; nothing be in itself anything. He would have been a master
of construction, but that his practice as a novelist made him long for descriptions and reminiscences. If Diarmuid and Grania failed in performance, and I am not sure that it did, it failed because the second act, instead of moving swiftly from incident to incident, was reminiscent and descriptive; almost a new first act. I had written enough poetical drama to know this and to point it out to Moore. After the performance and just before our final quarrel the letters speak of an agreement to rewrite this act. I had sent Moore a scenario.